Deployed Soldiers Quotes

Jabir listened but was not convinced.  “Iraq and Iran haven’t gotten along for many centuries. Why should we now?

I’ll be frank, Jerry. Aaron Morris telephoned here a week ago and wanted to know your whereabouts. I told him you were on leave. He said your wife called him about your whereabouts.

Yes, I never expected to see you!

Sure as hell doesn’t seem that Williams’ study and findings were general. This man talked from fact. I bet this is the scientist and study they want.

Remmich’s subconscious mind is controlled by us. He will get what we want.

Your long-term association with military intelligence is important. Let’s talk about what you might notice in them. Since this happened, one or two may have changed behavioral characteristics. Are there any with peculiarities different from when they started?

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.

I don’t know what afflicts me now. Indecisiveness? Reluctance? Fear of being vulnerable? I am not a coward, at least. Fear isn’t equivalent to cowardice. Even a soldier deployed at the border fears bullet, which is exactly why he is able to dodge the enemy and eliminate them.

Worry only about what you control. The rest is war.

I’m back. I’m still here. I never left.

The world he had left was not ready for his return, or rather, he was not ready to return to the world he had left.

What was it like? Hell if I know. But next time someone asks.... I'll answer crooked, and I'll answer long. And when they get confused or angry, I'll smile. Finally, I'll think. Someone who understands.

There is no way to imagine what it feels like to be shot at. I will never be with him when he is the most scared.

Afghanistan changed him, but Iraq sculpted him.

THE SUMMER OF 1863 marked a crucial transformation in the Union war effort—the organization and deployment of black regiments that would eventually amount to 180,000 soldiers, a substantial proportion of eligible black males.

The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, he later wrote of the decision he made. I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.

It is something that cannot be explained or even understood until you’ve lived it; a man can’t know or fully appreciate his life until he’s been close enough to taste the end of it, and the bonds forged in battle are some of the strongest a man could ever have. We are brothers, the men of ODA 022, and though we didn’t have the same blood running through our veins, we had all shed the blood of others together, and knew that none of us would hesitate to step in the way of fate and take a round or jump on a grenade to save one another.

As he moves through his day, sometimes he stops and just stares at me. There is something on the tip of his tongue. But he doesn't say it. I'm not sure he knows what it is.

The Crazy feeling builds and builds. It never stops, it never ends, there is no relief.

I had been categorized, placed into the correct clade, and the proper courtesies could now be deployed, while we went on to more critical matters like mushroom taxonomy.

Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home.

More than one soldier wondered if, at last, the French had found a magician of their own; the French infantrymen appeared much taller than ordinary men and the light in their eyes as they drew closer burnt with an almost supernatural fury. But this was only the magic of Napoleon Buonaparte, who knew better than any one how to dress his soldiers so they would terrify the enemy, and how to deploy them so that any onlooker would think them indestructible.

The Soviet officers and soldiers deployed to Germany scavenged whatever they could acquire—blue jeans, pornography, and even weapons—to sell or barter on the black market for vodka, then being restricted by the Red Army’s commanders

I hate myself that I wasn't there for him. I hate that I could not feel it in him. How could I not know what had happened? How could I not hear it in his voice, his comments, or in his demeanor? He needed my help, and I couldn't feel it.

Soon I’ll no longer have to worry about death; now it’s life I have to worry about. It’s now time for me to be a man, and it’s the scariest thing I’ll ever do. It really scares me. It really scares me that I won’t have what it takes. That’s a scary thought.

We’ve done these mental-health assessment team studies for six years now—between nine and twelve [months] is where a lot of the stress problems really manifest themselves, where the family problems really manifest themselves,” former Army chief of staff George Casey said recently. “The human mind and body weren’t made to do repeated combat deployments without substantial time to recover.” The suicide rate among active-duty servicemen doubled in the first five years of the Afghanistan War and then kept rising. In the past decade, the US Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan.

That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have the instruments they need and that they’ll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly—preferably at the intended airport. Parents deploy them against all that can go wrong in transporting small children. Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will.

Forget bringing the troops home from Iraq. We need to get the troops home from World War II. Can anybody tell me why, in 2009, we still have more than sixty thousand troops in Germany and thirty thousand in Japan? At some point, these people are going to have to learn to rape themselves. Our soldiers have been in Germany so long they now wear shorts with black socks. You know that crazy soldier hiding in the cave on Iwo Jima who doesn’t know the war is over? That’s us. Bush and Cheney used to love to keep Americans all sphinctered-up on the notion that terrorists might follow us home. But actually, we’re the people who go to your home and then never leave. Here’s the facts: The Republic of America has more than five hundred thousand military personnel deployed on more than seven hundred bases, with troops in one hundred fifty countries—we’re like McDonald’s with tanks—including thirty-seven European countries—because you never know when Portugal might invade Euro Disney. And this doesn’t even count our secret torture prisons, which are all over the place, but you never really see them until someone brings you there—kinda like IHOP. Of course, Americans would never stand for this in reverse—we can barely stand letting Mexicans in to do the landscaping. Can you imagine if there were twenty thousand armed Guatemalans on a base in San Ber-nardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber. And why? How did this country get stuck with an empire? I’m not saying we’re Rome. Rome had good infrastructure. But we are an empire, and the reason is because once America lands in a country, there is no exit strategy. We’re like cellulite, herpes, and Irish relatives: We are not going anywhere. We love you long time!

Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait … U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu.… “Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.

Threatening words are dispatched like soldiers under strict orders: Cause anxiety that cannot be ignored. Surprisingly, their deployment isn’t entirely bad news. It’s bad, of course, that someone threatens violence, but the threat means that at least for now, he has considered violence and decided against doing it. The threat means that at least for now (and usually forever), he favors words that alarm over actions that harm.

On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had “seemed outlandish in 1942,” as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.

As Eikenberry once put it to him, “If you had a choice about where to deploy thirty thousand new American troops, you would put five thousand into training Afghan forces, five thousand along the border with Pakistan, and twenty thousand in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” inside Pakistan. “That’s exactly the point,” Karzai answered. “You’re fighting a second-best strategy. You’re fighting Taliban foot soldiers in Afghanistan and destabilizing the country. You can’t play the game of saying Pakistan is your ally and telling me in private that they’re not.”14

But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.

I once read a question that somone used to begin their self-assessment: who do you most admire and why? If you are an american and have a TV in your house, you'd probably be tempted to list some sports figure, actor, singer, artist, successful businessman, or influential leader. We have been led to equate greatness with success, talent, power and recognition. Would we include on our list a single mom or dad who has faithfully served their family, the person who volunteers at the soup kitchen or homeless shelter, the guy who shovels snow for the elderly couple down the street or the soldier serving somewhere around the globe?

am an American Soldier. I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. (This had been underlined.) I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior task and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself. I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American Soldier.

Following someone covertly, either on foot or by car, costs around $175,000 per month—primarily for the salary of the agents doing the following. But if the police can place a tracker in the suspect’s car, or use a fake cell tower device to fool the suspect’s cell phone into giving up its location information, the cost drops to about $70,000 per month, because it only requires one agent. And if the police can hide a GPS receiver in the suspect’s car, suddenly the price drops to about $150 per month—mostly for the surreptitious installation of the device. Getting location information from the suspect’s cell provider is even cheaper: Sprint charges law enforcement only $30 per month. The difference is between fixed and marginal costs. If a police department performs surveillance on foot, following two people costs twice as much as following one person. But with GPS or cell phone surveillance, the cost is primarily for setting up the system. Once it is in place, the additional marginal cost of following one, ten, or a thousand more people is minimal. Or, once someone spends the money designing and building a telephone eavesdropping system that collects and analyzes all the voice calls in Afghanistan, as the NSA did to help defend US soldiers from improvised explosive devices, it’s cheap and easy to deploy that same technology against the telephone networks of other countries.

My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do. “How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked. “He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.” My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me?

Acronyms also weren’t terribly common until World War II, where they were deployed with aplomb. Unsurprisingly, most of the general words we have in English today that have true acronymic etymologies had their origins in the military: the aforementioned “radar,” “GI” (originally “galvanized iron,” if you can believe it, but misconstrued by soldiers and others as “government issue”), “snafu” and “fubar” (“ situation normal: all fucked up” and “fucked up beyond all recognition,” brought to you by government bureaucracy). It’s true that a few of them snuck into English before the early twentieth century, but very few: “RSVP” (répondez s’il vous plaît) and “AWOL” (absent without leave) are the only two that could be considered general vocabulary, and some people will complain that one of those is not a proper acronym but an initialism and so doesn’t count.* 4

Even seemingly simple scenarios of genetic screening force us to enter arenas of unnerving moral hazard. Take Friedman’s example of using a blood test to screen soldiers for genes that predispose to PTSD. At first glance, such a strategy would seem to mitigate the trauma of war: soldiers incapable of “fear extinction” might be screened and treated with intensive psychiatric therapies or medical therapies to return them to normalcy. But what if, extending the logic, we screen soldiers for PTSD risk before deployment? Would that really be desirable? Do we truly want to select soldiers incapable of registering trauma, or genetically “augmented” with the capacity to extinguish the psychic anguish of violence? Such a form of screening would seem to me to be precisely undesirable: a mind incapable of “fear extinction” is exactly the dangerous sort of mind to be avoided in war.

One of the days we were there, the program leaders, or mentors, as they were called, told us we couldn’t go on any flights because of the threat of sandstorms. To kill time, the marine who had lost his hands and I decided to take advantage of the amenities in camp. So we headed to the pool. He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic hands and when we arrived, I sat down on the edge of the pool, dangled my right leg in the water, and took off my left leg. We joked about how these guys got to go swimming on their days off. I mean, days off? I certainly never had one. As the two of us removed our limbs to get in the water, we noticed one of the active-duty guys already in the pool looking at us. He did a double take before asking, “What are y’all doing here?” Without a moment’s hesitation, we both said in unison, “We’re on vacation.” We said it with a blatantly arrogant tone as if to say, You think you’re deployed. We think you’re on vacation.

We started to snack on MREs (military “Meals, Ready to Eat”) we had in our packs. They were left over from the first deployment because no one ate MREs anymore. People were living in luxurious camps and eating meals prepared for them by kitchen staff. They had no need for MREs when they could have steak and lobster on Thursday nights. Well, we didn’t have access to that. We weren’t living in those camps. We were living in the midst of a war zone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So there we were with these old MREs that had been in extreme cold and then extreme heat a few times over. I opened mine up and squeezed cheese onto a cracker. The cheese was green. I scraped the putrid green cheese, the color of baby vomit, off and ate the cracker. I was hungry and had no other options. The other guys ate the expired MREs and started vomiting. Enough guys got sick that we were rushed some new kosher MREs. Yes, saved by the kosher meal option.

THE PREGNANT-NAVY SYNDROME It isn’t politically correct to even discuss this in the services, but. . . a large percentage of women soldiers are electively aborting their fetuses after they’ve served their purpose of enabling them to avoid their tour of duty in Operation Desert Storm. . . . It is wrong to use a fetus to shirk the responsibility for which you have signed up, and then to kill that fetus. —NAME WITHHELD, Army-Physician, Kuwait22 The mentality of valuing self also produces the “Pregnant-Navy Syndrome”: the phenomenon of a woman benefiting from the technical training and then, just prior to her ship’s being deployed, becoming pregnant so as to qualify for shore leave and not being deployed; or becoming pregnant immediately after her ship is deployed, thus allowing her increasingly to shirk responsibilities, forcing her shipmates to pick up the slack. This is all compatible with valuing self, but in a military situation—when more than .40 percent of the women on ships like the USS Acadia become pregnant during workup for deployment23—this bailing out puts men’s lives in danger.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death. When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.' Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight. In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.

M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)

Kids . . . were hustled through basic training and speedily deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, only to find another army already there—the shadow army of private for-profit defense contractors. Most of them were contracted to do a long list of chores that uniformed soldiers used to do for themselves when, courtesy of conscription, there were a lot more of them. To maximize their profits and minimize their work, however, the private contractors hired subcontractors who, in turn, hired subcontractors from third world countries to ship in laborers to do on the cheap the actual grunt work of hauling water and food supplies, cleaning latrines, collecting garbage, burning trash, preparing food, washing laundry, fixing electrical grids, doing construction, and staffing the fast food stands and beauty salons that sold tacos and pedicures to the troops.

The differences between these two types of adaptation are profoundly important for applied physical performance in a non-sport-specific situation. For example, a deployed soldier in a battlefield scenario must often depend on his physical preparedness to stay alive. Strength has been universally reported to be a more valuable capacity than the ability to run 5 miles in 30 minutes, because at the time of this writing our combat troops are mechanized. They don’t have to walk or run into combat, since we have machines for that now. If a limited endurance capacity is necessary – and some could successfully argue that it is – that capacity can be readily developed in a few weeks prior to deployment, while a much more valuable strength adaptation takes many months or years to acquire, is more important to combat readiness than endurance, and is a much more persistent adaptation in the face of forced detraining than the ability to run, which you’re not going to use on the battlefield anyway. The stubborn insistence on an endurance-based preparation for combat readiness is an unfortunate anachronism that should be reevaluated soon.

I'm obsessed with trying to recount events as accurately and honestly as possible, but in practice the only thing I'm really any good at is telling you how I feel.

The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained.

I feel like so much has been left undone. There are friends I won't see before I leave, there are bills I still need to pay. I haven't written as much as I've wanted, and there are countless things I've said that I wish I could correct, but this is a process that will never end. When my grandmother died she left a library full of books she never finished reading. This is how I feel now.

Conditions in the forests and mills eventually improved, but credit for most of those gains goes to the War Department. Desperate to prevent labor unrest from interfering with war production, it employed soldiers in the forest and organized all loggers into a new union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, or “4-L.” They deployed soldiers, called the Spruce Divisions, and forced reforms for the benefit of enlisted man.

What was the last thing he’d said to her? It’s on the tip of her tongue, She can’t remember what she’d heard, Vowels ripped and consonants undone, Stuck in the space between words, Muted language that refuses to come

on the afternoon of October 6, 1973. Egypt would send 100,000 men and 1,550 tanks against 436 Israeli soldiers with 3 tanks manning the Bar-Lev Line, while Syrian deployed 1,500 tanks and 942 artillery guns against 177 tanks in the Golan Heights. The latest battle for the Jewish state’s survival had begun.

In the autumn after his graduation, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University but spent most of his time drinking and drunk. He rarely went to class and never completed assignments. He was kicked out of school after the first term. His father and he began to argue about his drinking and his father threatened to throw him out of the house. During one of their discussions, his father mentioned that the military might provide some direction to his life, thinking it would make a man out of him. Dahmer never wanted to become a soldier, but he loved his dad and wanted to please him; besides, he thought it would be an opportunity to see the world and maybe forget about the dismembered body in the woods. Jeff signed up for four years and received training as an army medic. Boot camp was difficult, but it challenged him mentally and physically. He began to feel good about himself and was too busy to think about his secret. He deployed to Germany and bunked with several other soldiers. After his shift, he had a lot of free time and began to frequent the beer gardens. His drinking soon accelerated and eventually got him into trouble.

God created his daughters to be ezer-warriors with our brothers. He deploys the ezer to break the man's aloneness by soldiering with him wholeheartedly and at full strength for God's gracious kingdom. The man needs everything she brings to their global mission.

After the most likely outcome is identified, they develop a plan for coping with the situation, and then practice this skill with both professional examples (a soldier has not returned from a land navigation drill; you received a negative review from a superior) and personal examples (your child is doing poorly at school, and you are not home to help; your spouse is having a hard time managing the finances while you are deployed). The

During the Serbian conflict in the 1990s, for instance, the Pentagon made sure to get the FDA’s assent before offering troops deployed in the Balkans an experimental vaccine against tick-borne encephalitis. And only soldiers who wished to receive the vaccine were given it.

Einstein’s closest friend was the brilliant chemist Fritz Haber, who turned his intellect to the invention of the poisonous gases that could be deployed in battle, thus playing his part in murdering and terrifying thousands of soldiers.15 The Germany of the early twentieth century was at the pinnacle of human culture: science, literature, scholarship, music. That it turned to conquest and large-scale murder gives the lie to the claim that higher culture is humanizing in itself.

Then General MacArthur literally called in the cavalry--and the infantry. As thousands of government employees watched, a phalanx of soldiers marched against the veterans, forcing them out of their camps at bayonet point. And just to make sure, tanks were deployed, too--under the command of Major George S. Patton--as well as gas. Yes, it's true: Soldiers of the United States Army gassed veterans of World War I in the streets of the nation's capital in the summer of 1932.

The Australian Department of Defence asked his research group to measure the effects of deployment to combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan on mental and biological functioning, including brain-wave patterns. In the initial phase McFarlane and his colleagues measured the qEEG in 179 combat troops four months prior to and four months after each successive deployment to the Middle East. They found that the total number of months in combat over a three-year period was associated with progressive decreases in alpha power at the back of the brain. This area, which monitors the state of the body and regulates such elementary processes as sleep and hunger, ordinarily has the highest level of alpha waves of any region in the brain, particularly when people close their eyes. As we have seen, alpha is associated with relaxation. The decrease in alpha power in these soldiers reflects a state of persistent agitation. At the same time the brain waves at the front of the brain, which normally have high levels of beta, show a progressive slowing with each deployment. The soldiers gradually develop frontal-lobe activity that resembles that of children with ADHD, which interferes with their executive functioning and capacity for focused attention. The

America had not done that. Its influence had fallen to a seventy-year ebb under Bush, and the inspirational rhetoric of Obama could not revive it. Promoting democracy and pushing back against Putin were not in the first rank of the new president’s priorities. He now was in charge of the war machinery of the Pentagon and the CIA, the lethal weapons of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and as Obama sent more troops into Afghanistan and deployed a barrage of Predators and special-operations forces to hunt and kill America’s enemies abroad, the greatest part of the foreign policy of the United States was not executed by diplomats and democracy advocates but by soldiers and spies.

In 1952 MI6 commissioned a series of trials at the Porton Down military facility near Stonehenge, thinking LSD could be useful as a weapon of warfare.* Soldiers deployed on routine exercises under the influence of the drug43 – who mostly just had trouble reading maps and decided to climb trees instead – gave some indication for how the molecule could be useful. Not as a truth serum, but as a mode of destabilising the enemy: a battlefield incapacitant. Hippies would later bear placards stating DROP ACID, NOT BOMBS in protest of American campaigns in Vietnam, but militarists had pondered doing exactly that 15 years earlier.

In some ways, the Saudi response to Iran has followed its long-established security policies; spend billions of dollars on advanced weapons and turn to traditional partners for support. In 2019, Riyadh made the first payments on an estimated $15 billion contract for Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense system. That summer, Saudi Arabia reopened the Prince Sultan Air Base for the deployment of US aircraft, air defense missile batteries, and several thousand soldiers and airmen. Yet in other ways the Saudi response under King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman has been unconventional and may become even more so. Launching an independent air campaign in Yemen or investing seriously in a domestic defense industry were new approaches. Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.

I was often frightened, forever dirty and exhausted, but I believed in our purpose too. In time I forgot where it had arisen from—my master’s distress over Aramis’s death, the conversation on Christmas Eve, the priest’s lost brothers and the vows my master had made—and began to believe that war was necessary, important—noble even. Why else would people kill each other with such decency and skill? Why else would soldiers wear uniforms, buttons gleaming, shoes polished like shellac? Battles of course grew jagged and messy, but the lead-up, the deployment, the training, the sacred hierarchy of command was impressive. Only orchestras of musicians, I would discover, had the same admirable ability to tie many humans together in a single purpose.

Being in a combat zone is almost a constant adrenaline rush, and it should be. The moment you get comfortable and complacent is the moment you lose. When you’re on a deployment, it almost feels like time stops, or maybe it feels more like you’re in some kind of a twilight zone. Your family and friends are all moving on without you while you’re stuck living the same day over and over, like in the movie Groundhog Day. You get up, conduct personal hygiene, report to duty, conduct physical fitness somewhere in there, and do personal hygiene again before you pass out in your bunk for the night. If you’re lucky, you might get to sleep through the night. The base sirens would interrupt other nights, signaling you to grab your gear and get in a bunker. Your friends and family back home don’t understand this. They don’t understand the fear, the adrenaline rush, the twilight zone effect, and it sometimes seems pretty lonely. But you’re not alone. No matter what walk of life you’ve come from, you’re not alone. Everyone out there is in a similar situation and understands what it’s like. They become your new family during the deployment. While deployed, there’s a good chance you’ll see and/or experience things that will haunt you. Some learn to detach themselves from those situations and almost experience them from a bird’s eye view, somehow making them seem less real. Often, soldiers cope by making light of a bad situation. As a result, dark humor runs rampant amongst Service Members. While those on the outside may see that dark humor as cruel, it is just another way that you learn to deal with the atrocities of war. I digress. Let’s get back into it.

The protesters remained defiant. They called for a meeting to be held at one ofthe town’s public parks, Jallianwala Bagh, on the afternoon of 13 April. General Dyer issued a proclamation banning the meeting, sending soldiers with megaphones into the streets to warn people against attending. A crowd of several thousand gathered nonetheless. Enraged that his proclamation was disregarded, Dyer proceeded to the meeting place with some fifty soldiers and two armoured cars. The 13th of April was Baisakhi, Sikh New Year’s Day. From the morning, pilgrims had filed into the Golden Temple. After visiting the shrine, many worshippers walked over to the nearby Jallianwala Bagh, to rest and chat in the park before returning home. By the time Dyer reached the park, this mixed crowd of protesters and worshippers was several thousand strong. The armoured cars could not negotiate the narrow lanes of the old town, so Dyer and his men disembarked and proceeded on foot. Having deployed his troops, the general at once gave orders to open fire on the crowd facing him in the enclosure. In panic the crowd dispersed, towards the park’s single entrance, now blocked by the troops. Dyer shouted to his men to continue shooting. Asking them to reload their magazines, he personally directed fire at the densest parts of the crowd. Some 1650 rounds were fired. Almost 400 people died in the carnage.

But the most profound effect of that era was on the Pakistan military’s thinking. Intoxicated by victory, the ISI sought to replicate its success in Afghanistan by employing the same tactics elsewhere. Through the 1990s, it established its own jihadi groups and deployed them to attack Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and it funnelled cash to foreign Islamist guerrillas as far afield as the Philippines. At home, the emboldened spy agency meddled aggressively in politics, mostly in an effort to oust Benazir Bhutto. ISI officers rigged elections, bought politicians and strong-armed troublesome judges. Critics began to speak of a ‘state within a state’.

Mahmud’s highly mobile army rarely fell below the force of 100,000 that he amassed to attack Balkh in 999.5 In recruiting and deploying his slave soldiers, Mahmud was blind to color, ethnicity, and religion. He did not hesitate, for example, to send Hindu forces against the Turkic, Persian, or Indian armies that were defending Muslim cities. Even his own household consisted mainly of slaves. Far from being constrained by his Muslim faith, Mahmud believed that the highest religious authority, the caliph, had validated his actions and confirmed all the dubious privileges he so freely exercised.

Realizing he wouldn’t get more soldiers, Schoomaker told his subordinates to squeeze more out of what they had. Each of ten regular Army divisions raised a fourth maneuver brigade, adding ten more deployable BCTs to the pool. Divisions shut down long-established but now extraneous headquarters: the division engineer brigade, the division artillery, the division support command, the MI battalion, and the signal battalion. All of their subordinate battalions and companies got divvied up and assigned to the new BCTs. Short-range air-defense battalions converted to cavalry squadrons—every BCT got one, yet another reflection of the critical importance of finding the enemy in this war. Along with the new cavalry squadrons, brigades cut to two infantry or armor battalions, giving up their old third-maneuver battalions to help create the new BCTs. Inside the heavy battalions, the ones with tanks and Bradleys, the model became two tank and two Bradley companies, plus an armored engineer company, a formidable array. The light battalions (airborne, air assault, and light infantry) also kept four companies: three rifle units and a weapons company. Cold War air defense, heavy artillery, chemical defense, and headquarters went away, cashed in to create the new BCTs.

Being a soldier in wartime is a sick profession. How is that when I hear the word "deployment", I am able to effortlessly flick a switch and shut off my family? Yet when I returned from deployment, there was no such switch to reconnect me to my children and parents? It doesn't equate. I don't get to pick up where I left off. I will have to rebuild.

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.

The strategic level is concerned with the use of military force to achieve national objectives. In the new American style of war, it has come to be interpreted as the highest political and diplomatic level at which decisions are made to collect and deploy military forces to a distant theater. The size of strategic land forces varies, depending on the nature of the topography and the seriousness of the enemy threat. In past limited wars, deployments involved relatively large armies consisting of multiple corps of 50,000 soldiers each. The numbers of soldiers deployed in more recent campaigns have been considerably smaller. The strategic challenge in the years ahead will center on "time versus risk"-that is, the decisions that must be made to balance the size of the strategic force to be projected versus the time necessary for the force to arrive ready to fight. The United States must be able to overcome the problems of distance and time without unnecessarily exposing early arriving forces to an enemy already in place within a theater of war. The operational level of warfare provides a connection between strategic deployments and the tactical engagements of small units. The "art" of maneuvering forces to achieve decisive results on the battlefield nest here. As with the deployments of strategic level forces, the basic elements of operational maneuver have shrunk as the conflict environment has changed since the end of the Second World War. During the Cold War, corps conducted operational maneuver. More recently, the task has devolved to brigades, usually self contained units of all arms capable of independent maneuver. An independent brigade consists of about 5,000 soldiers. At the operational level, ground forces will face the challenge of determining the proper balance between "firepower and maneuver" resources and technologies to ensure that the will of the enemy's army to resist can be collapsed quickly and decisively. Battles are fought at the tactical level. In the past, the tactical fight has been a face-to-face endeavor; small units of about company size, no more that several hundred soldiers, are locked in combat at close range. The tactical fight is where most casualties occur. The tactical challenge of the future will be to balance the anticipated "ends," or what the combat commander is expected to achieve on the battlefield, with the "means," measured in the lives of soldiers allocated to achieve those ends. Since ground forces suffer casualties disproportionately, ground commanders face the greatest challenge of balancing ends versus means. All three challenges must be addressed together if reform of the landpower services - the Army and the Marine Corps - is to be swift and lasting. The essential moderating influence on the process of change is balance. At the strategic level, the impulse to arrive quickly must be balanced with the need for forces massive and powerful enough to fight successfully on arrival. The impulse to build a firepower-dominant operational forces will be essential if the transitory advantage of fires is to be made permanent by the presence of ground forces in the enemy's midst. The impulse to culminate tactical battle by closing with and destroying the enemy must be balanced by the realization that fighting too close may play more to the advantage of enemy rather than friendly forces.

It was the deployment of British soldiers to colonial cities strictly for the purpose of enforcing the law that set long-smoldering hostilities aflame. Using general warrants, British soldiers were allowed to enter private homes, confiscate what they found, and often keep the bounty for themselves. The policy was reminiscent of today’s civil asset forfeiture laws, which allow police to seize and keep for their departments cash, cars, luxury goods, and even homes, often under only the thinnest allegation of criminality.

After the massacre, the worst domestic terrorist attack since 9/11, General George Casey, army chief of staff, bleated that a “greater tragedy” than the mass murder and maiming would be “if our diversity becomes a casualty.” The administration fraudulently labeled the killings of U.S. troops who were about to deploy to a war zone as “workplace violence,” not international terrorism—a finding that denied Purple Hearts to the soldiers killed and wounded in the attack.

An ordinary travel agency took care of the practicalities of chartering trains in exactly the same way as they dealt with such matters normally. Ordinary railway staff were deployed to organise the logistics of the transport, plotting train times into schedules, passing information on through the system. The camps were built, personnel received their orders, the industry began. Some of the soldiers must have been picked out on account of their brutality, many being obvious sadists who could find outlet and indulge themselves here, while others were ordinary and, in any context, considerate men doing a job for work. Two years later they tried to remove all traces; having demolished Teblinka’s every structure they built a farm on the site and instructed the Ukrainian family they installed in it to say they had lived there always. The same occurred in Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno, all traces gone. All around, life went on as nothing had happened.

In 2009, an American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl slipped through a gap in the concertina wire at his combat outpost in southern Afghanistan and walked off into the night. He was quickly captured by a Taliban patrol, and his absence triggered a massive search by the US military that put thousands of his fellow soldiers at risk. The level of betrayal felt by soldiers was so extreme that many called for Bergdahl to be tried for treason when he was repatriated five years later. Technically his crime was not treason, so the US military charged him with desertion of his post—a violation that still carries a maximum penalty of death. The collective outrage at Sergeant Bergdahl was based on very limited knowledge but provides a perfect example of the kind of tribal ethos that every group—or country—deploys in order to remain unified and committed to itself. If anything, though, the outrage in the United States may not be broad enough. Bergdahl put a huge number of people at risk and may have caused the deaths of up to six soldiers. But in purely objective terms, he caused his country far less harm than the financial collapse of 2008, when bankers gambled trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on blatantly fraudulent mortgages. These crimes were committed while hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in wars overseas. Almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the financial crisis, 5 million families lost their homes, and the unemployment rate doubled to around 10 percent. For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate, and after the financial collapse, America’s suicide rate increased by nearly 5 percent. In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimated that the recession cost almost 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years—disproportionately among middle-aged white men. That is close to the nation’s losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. If Sergeant Bergdahl betrayed his country—and that’s not a hard case to make—surely the bankers and traders who caused the financial collapse did as well. And yet they didn’t provoke nearly the kind of outcry that Bergdahl did. Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.

In the late 1880s, he deployed it to argue for the profound reform of French education, and not just for the elites, but for the masses too. He certainly thought that the English model and its focus on team sports and ball games was preferable to the regimented gymnastics of the German Turnen tradition. Many in France had looked to Prussia, its traditions of nationalist gymnastics, drill and military success, and called for the transformation of French physical education and the armed forces on German lines. Coubertin, by contrast, argued, ‘It is citizens more than soldiers that France needs. It is not militarism that our education needs, but freedom.

To this day, one of my great regrets in life is that I did not deploy in 2013 with the group of men and women whom I spent so much time growing close to. I cherish the memories that I have while in uniform and have learned to understand that everything is in God's timing, not mine.

I am going to kill you.” These six words may have triggered more high-stakes predictions than any other sentence ever spoken. They have certainly caused a great deal of fear and anxiety. But why? Perhaps we believe only a deranged and dangerous person would even think of harming us, but that just isn’t so. Plenty of people have thought of harming you: the driver of the car behind you who felt you were going too slowly, the person waiting to use the pay-phone you were chatting on, the person you fired, the person you walked out on—they have all hosted a fleeting violent idea. Though thoughts of harming you may be terrible, they are also inevitable. The thought is not the problem; the expression of the thought is what causes us anxiety, and most of the time that’s the whole idea. Understanding this will help reduce unwarranted fear. That someone would intrude on our peace of mind, that they would speak words so difficult to take back, that they would exploit our fear, that they would care so little about us, that they would raise the stakes so high, that they would stoop so low—all of this alarms us, and by design. Threatening words are dispatched like soldiers under strict orders: Cause anxiety that cannot be ignored. Surprisingly, their deployment isn’t entirely bad news. It’s bad, of course, that someone threatens violence, but the threat means that at least for now, he has considered violence and decided against doing it. The threat means that at least for now (and usually forever), he favors words that alarm over actions that harm. For an instrument of communication used so frequently, the threat is little understood, until you think about it. The parent who threatens punishment, the lawyer who threatens unspecified “further action,” the head of state who threatens war, the ex-husband who threatens murder, the child who threatens to make a scene—all are using words with the exact same intent: to cause uncertainty. Our social world relies on our investing some threats with credibility while discounting others. Our belief that they really will tow the car if we leave it here encourages us to look for a parking space unencumbered by that particular threat. The disbelief that our joking spouse will really kill us if we are late to dinner allows us to stay in the marriage. Threats, you see, are not the issue—context is the issue.

It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.” “What day?” “The release date.” “What are we talking about?” “Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.” Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.” “It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny. Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?” “I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.” “We can get it today?” “No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.” “Mahhuum!” “How bad can it be?” says Armand. “How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.” “And you had?” “I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.” “Sounds great.” “Armand, really. How old are you?” “I don’t see what my age has to do with it.” “Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’” Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters. “How much does it cost?” Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands. Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.” Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.” “One hundred dollars.” Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.” “For a video game, Alex.” “Yhep.” “No way.” “Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine. “Don’t whine,” Armand tells him. “On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.” “Neat.” “Their turbans are on fire.” “Even better.” “Armand,” Leah says. “Dad,” says Alessandro. He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.

Foreshadowing: Was my challenging Allah to unleash the full weight of his fury upon us, with dark clouds looming in the distance.

I had just drifted off to sleep when Jerry woke me up. “Hey, we’re going to take the Humvee and pick up the rest of the platoon. They’re done with the gravel run. There’s no mission. We need empty seats in the Humvee. I just wanted you to know that we’re leaving. Go back to sleep,” Jerry whispered. I leapt right off my cot and said, “No, sir. If you go, I go. If y’all go and something happens I will never forgive myself. And what if y’all get into an awesome firefight? I’m itching for that. I’m not going to miss that. I am going and I am driving the lead vehicle.” Jerry protested. “What about Gebhardt? He doesn’t want you driving.” “He can yell at me when we get there,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go. And I want to drive. I never get to drive,” Jerry said. “Jerry, you’re not driving. You can ride in the Humvee with me but you’re not driving. I’m not going to let you.” Now, Jerry outranked me, which meant he could do whatever he wanted. But that was also why he wasn’t supposed to drive. I was talking to Jerry as a friend now, though. I reminded him of that conversation we had in the gym before we deployed. “I told you that I was never going to let anything happen to you. I would jump in front of a bullet to keep you from getting hurt. Nothing will ever happen to you while I’m around. You’re not driving.” He finally relented and said, “Okay.” We piled into the Humvees and headed out. Jerry rode with me in the lead vehicle. That’s not following protocol. The platoon leader should be in the middle of the convoy, but neither Jerry nor I ever wanted to be there. We wanted to be in the lead, always.

In his recent guest editorial, Richard McNally voices skepticism about the National Vietnam Veteran’s Readjustment Study (NVVRS) data reporting that over one-half of those who served in the Vietnam War have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or subclinical PTSD. Dr McNally is particularly skeptical because only 15% of soldiers served in combat units (1). He writes, “the mystery behind the discrepancy in numbers of those with the disease and of those in combat remains unsolved today” (4, p 815). He talks about bizarre facts and implies many, if not most, cases of PTSD are malingered or iatrogenic. Dr McNally ignores the obvious reality that when people are deployed to a war zone, exposure to trauma is not limited to members of combat units (2,3). At the Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centre of the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, we have assessed over 100 Canadian soldiers, many of whom have never been in combat units, who have experienced a range of horrific traumas and threats in places like Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. We must inform Dr McNally that, in real world practice, even cooks and clerks are affected when faced with death, genocide, ethnic cleansing, bombs, landmines, snipers, and suicide bombers ... One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients." Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

Late in November, he suddenly appeared at Fort Lyon with the 3rd Colorado and other units and announced his intention to attack Black Kettle. Several officers remonstrated, declaring that the Cheyennes had been led to understand that they were prisoners of war. Chivington responded, as one of the protesters recalled, that “he believed it to be right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians that would kill women and children, and ‘damn any man that was in sympathy with Indians.’“ On November 29, 1864, Chivington methodically deployed his command, about 700 strong with four howitzers, around Black Kettle’s village. The chief, shouting reassurances to his alarmed people, ran up an American flag and a white flag over his tepee. Then the troops opened fire and charged. The Indians fled in panic in all directions. Only one pocket of resistance formed, and that was speedily eliminated. Chivington had made clear his wish that prisoners not be taken, and a massacre followed as the soldiers indiscriminately shot down men, women, and children. Interpreter John Smith later testified: “They were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” Two hundred Cheyennes, two-thirds of them women and children, perished. Nine chiefs died, but Black Kettle made good his escape. As

AT 3:00 P.M. SHARP on August 23, 2012, Colonel Edgar escorted the two men into Mattis’s office on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The sixty-one-year-old general was an intimidating figure in person: muscular and broad shouldered, with dark circles under his eyes that suggested a man who didn’t bother much with sleep. His office was decorated with the mementos of a long military career. Amid the flags, plaques, and coins, Shoemaker’s eyes rested briefly on a set of magnificent swords displayed in a glass cabinet. As they sat down in a wood-paneled conference room off to one side of the office, Mattis cut to the chase: “Guys, I’ve been trying to get this thing deployed for a year now. What’s going on?” Shoemaker had gone over everything again with Gutierrez and felt confident he was on solid ground. He spoke first, giving a brief overview of the issues raised by an in-theater test of the Theranos technology. Gutierrez took over from there and told the general his army colleague was correct in his interpretation of the law: the Theranos device was very much subject to regulation by the FDA. And since the agency hadn’t yet reviewed and approved it for commercial use, it could only be tested on human subjects under strict conditions set by an institutional review board. One of those conditions was that the test subjects give their informed consent—something that was notoriously hard to obtain in a war zone. Mattis was reluctant to give up. He wanted to know if they could suggest a way forward. As he’d put it to Elizabeth in an email a few months earlier, he was convinced her invention would be “a game-changer” for his men. Gutierrez and Shoemaker proposed a solution: a “limited objective experiment” using leftover de-identified blood samples from soldiers. It would obviate the need to obtain informed consent and it was the only type of study that could be put together as quickly as Mattis seemed to want to proceed. They agreed to pursue that course of action. Fifteen minutes after they’d walked in, Shoemaker and Gutierrez shook Mattis’s hand and walked out. Shoemaker was immensely relieved. All in all, Mattis had been gruff but reasonable and a workable compromise had been reached. The limited experiment agreed upon fell short of the more ambitious live field trial Mattis had had in mind. Theranos’s blood tests would not be used to inform the treatment of wounded soldiers. They would only be performed on leftover samples after the fact to see if their results matched the army’s regular testing methods. But it was something. Earlier in his career, Shoemaker had spent five years overseeing the development of diagnostic tests for biological threat agents and he would have given his left arm to get access to anonymized samples from service members in theater. The data generated from such testing could be very useful in supporting applications to the FDA. Yet, over the ensuing months, Theranos inexplicably failed to take advantage of the opportunity it was given. When General Mattis retired from the military in March 2013, the study using leftover de-identified samples hadn’t begun. When Colonel Edgar took on a new assignment as commander of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases a few months later, it still hadn’t started. Theranos just couldn’t seem to get its act together. In July 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Shoemaker retired from the army. At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.

By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? During my second tour in Iraq, I was commander of SEAL Team Three, Task Unit Bruiser. We were deployed to the war-torn city of Ramadi, the epicenter of the insurgency at the time. Only a few weeks into the deployment, we conducted a large operation in conjunction with U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. Marines, and friendly Iraqi Army soldiers. There were multiple elements on the battlefield, all engaged in heavy enemy contact. In the fog of war, mistakes were made. Bad luck emerged. Things went wrong. There ended up being a vicious firefight between one of my SEAL elements and a friendly Iraqi unit. An Iraqi soldier was killed and several others were wounded, including one of my SEALs. It was a nightmare. While there was plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of people who had made mistakes, I realized there was only one person to blame: me. I was the commander. I was the senior man on the battlefield, and I was responsible for everything that happened. Everything. As a leader, there is no one else to blame. Don’t make excuses. If I don’t take ownership of problems, I can’t solve them. That’s what a leader has to do: take ownership of the problems, the mistakes, and the shortfalls, and take ownership of creating and implementing solutions to get those problems solved. Take ownership.

And among the most bizarre aspects of the ‘total war’ drive in the second half of 1944 was the fact that at precisely the time he was combing out the last reserves of manpower, Goebbels – according to film director Veit Harlan – was allowing him, at Hitler’s express command, to deploy 187,000 soldiers, withdrawn from active service, as extras for the epic colour film of national heroism, Kolberg, depicting the defence of the small Baltic town against Napoleon as a model for the achievements of total war. According to Harlan, Hitler as well as Goebbels was ‘convinced that such a film was more useful than a military victory’. Even in the terminal crisis of the regime, propaganda had to come first.

The present is always dissolving into the past, he realized long ago. The present dissolves. It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds. That's the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it; the past has set up camp, deployed soldiers with toothbrushes to scrub away all of the now, and the more you think about it, the faster everything dissolves. There is no present. There was no present. Or, another way to think about it: your life could go on without you.

Traditionally,” Sir Bedivere continues, “we would be secure inside our castle stronghold, thoroughly protected from the enemy by high, thick walls. Our opponent would then attempt his siege in four distinct stages. First, the commander of the opposing army would call for our surrender, which we would immediately decline, resulting in a spirited exchange of well-crafted insults. Then, the enemy would attempt to scale our walls using waves of expendable foot soldiers. Of course, here we would simply deploy the usual means of repellent, such as flaming arrows, large stones, and boiling oil. Next, they would attempt to breach our defenses by hurling large objects at our walls, including rocks, boulders, and unfortunate prisoners of war. Finally, if they are successful in driving a breach, they would then dispatch their knights for hand-to-hand combat.